Rigor is not a substitute for imagination.

People sometimes are so confident in their flawed beliefs that they get stuck - fixated - and as a result are blinded to insights that are right in front of them.

I worry about leaders in complex situations who don't have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.

The ability to help others gain insights seems very important to me, and I think one of the most effective, but most difficult, ways is to listen sympathetically when people seem to be saying stupid things or thinking in confused ways. Rather than write them off, we can try to diagnose what is wrong with their thinking - what flawed belief they might be holding. And then search for ways that enables them to discover the flawed belief for themselves.

It is instructive to see how organizations pursue their goal of reducing errors and uncertainty. They impose standards, employ checklists, demand that knowledge workers list assumptions for their conclusions and document all sources. These actions either directly interfere with forming insights or create an environment where insights and discoveries are treated with suspicion because they might lead to errors. They signal to knowledge workers that their job is not to make mistakes. Even if they don't make discoveries, no one can blame them as long as they don't make mistakes.

You need to take your gut feeling as an important data point, but then you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it, to see if it makes sense in this context.

There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.